Firaxis Games and publisher 2K have confirmed a new game called Sid Meier’s Starships. The title is already in development for a 2015 release on PC/Mac/iOS. The game itself is a turn based strategy games that set in the same universe as Civilization: Beyond Earth.

As one might already imagine by the title and description, players will take charge of a fleet of starships and explore the galaxy. Sounds sort of like turn by turn Star Trek to us, but with more interaction and better special effects. Meier claims that he was “intrigued by the idea of exploring he next story of Civilization: Beyond Earth”.

One of the more interesting things is if you happen to already own Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth you will be able to connect the two games. We don’t know much about how the two games will interact as of yet, but just idea of two games being cross-connected sounds innovative, but we will have to wait and see how this comes out in the end.

Turtle Rock and publisher 2K have confirmed that Evolve has gone gold and had been sent out to replication. The game will release in February as previously announced.

To celebrate Evolve going gold, the developer has released the opening cinematic video for everyone to check out.

In other Evolve news, the open Beta test for the Xbox One will start on January 15th and it will be open to all Xbox One owners that are Xbox Live Gold subscribers. In addition a Limited technical test will be held for the PC and PlayStation 4 starting on January 16th. The technical test will be open to those that were in the Big Alpha that was held last year. Both tests will run till January 19th.

The Big Alpha for Evolved that started on October 30th and ran to November 4th was a success for developer Turtle Rock. The developer was able to collect some good data that should help make the launch next year much more successful.

In addition to the developer testing, a lot of stats from the Big Alpha were collected. Over 1,327,493 rounds were played resulting in the Hunters winning 753,414 games. The monsters were only able to muster 574,079 wins.

The Assult and Monster classes were almost even with the medic class coming in as third most popular. Single longest round lasted almost 40 minutes, but there were 7,168,460 views of the Alpha on Twitch, with 2,062,140 hours having been watched.

Turtle Rock says that Evolved is still on track to be released in February 2015.

Humble Bundle has been making some rather interesting bundles for quite some time but it has been a while since we saw a big publisher join up with them for something really interesting. Today, 2K Games jumped in for what might be the best bundle so far.

As always there are plenty of games that you can get depending how much you are willing to pay for the bundle so with anything above US $1 you get Bioshock, The Bureau: XCOM Declassifed and The Darkness II. In case you go over the average, which is set at US $7.47 at the time of the writing, you also get Bioshock 2, Mafia II, Spec Ops: The Line and couple of other games that will be announced later.

Last but not least there is the full bundle for which you have to pay US $20 or more where you also get XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Bioshock Infinite, two rather good titles that you really should not miss.

The best part of all Humble Bundle bundles is that the money spent goes into charity and this time around Humble Bundle is supporting the American Red Cross and Action Against Hunger charities.

Sources have been whispering for some time that the new 2K Studio in San Francisco that is being led by Rod Fergusson was working on something. We know that at least several from 2K Marin have followed Fergusson over to this new studio.

What we are hearing now is that 2K San Fran has taken over Mafia 3 from 2K Czech. Team leads along with at least some other folks from 2K Czech have apparently transferred to the new 2K San Fran studio.

From what we have been able to untangle, 2K San Francisco will be starting from scratch on Mafia 3 and will not be using what 2K Czech had developed. Instead they will be rebuilding the game from the ground up and starting over to deliver a better product.

As for 2K Czech, we are not exactly sure what its fate will ultimately be. We know that it under when some layoffs back in 2011 and that layoff is being blamed for the reason that Mafia 3 was not delivered before on its expected timeline. It is unknown exactly how many people are still left at 2K Czech and going forward if they stay open, what project they might be working on.

Although Oppo already announced that its upcoming Oppo Find 7 will feature a yet-to-be-sized 2560x1440 resolution screen, Vivo has jumped the gun and announced the first 2K, QuadHD, 2560x1440 6-inch smartphone equipped with Snapdragon 800 chipset.

Although still only limited to China market, for now at least, the Vivo Xplay 3S will have an 6-inch display with 2560x1440 resolution which adds up to impressive 490ppi pixel density. Based on Qualcomm's current flagship chipset, the Snapdragon 800, in its 8974AB version which features four Krait 400 CPU cores clocked at up to 2.3GHz and Adreno GPU. The new Vivo Xplay 3S also features 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, stereo speakers with DTS sound, dual-mode LTE connectivity, 13-megapixel rear camera and 5-megapixel front one, fingerprint sensor on the back as well as the 3200mAh battery.

Design wise, the new Vivo Xplay 3S does not look half bad either and with 4.5mm-thick body with metallic bezel and 172g of weight, it should go neck to neck with most flagship smartphones on the market. It runs on Funtouch OS, Vivo's custom version of the Google Android OS.

Unfortunately, there is still no details regarding the precise availability date but Chinese online store has already been taking orders and it is expected that Vivo will do a full launch before the Chinese New Year on January 31st. The price is set at CN¥3,498 or around US $580 and it appears that Vivo certainly has big plans for other markets.

Another Epic alum that departed some time back is Rod Fergusson who moved to Irrational Games to help finish up Bioshock Infinite as Executive VP of Development. Prior to that he was the Director of Production at Epic Games.

Fegusson has confirmed via his Twitter feed that he in conjunction with 2K Games is opening up an brand new studio in the San Francisco Bay Area. While he does not go into detail, he says that the studio already has a new exciting project to work on. He promises details will follow soon.

Developer Firaxis Games and 2K Games will release XCOM: Enemy Unknown on October 9th in North America, and October 12th for the release of the other regions. A desktop wallpaper in the 2K Forums tells the story. The release date is confirmed for all three versions, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC.

Pre-ordering details have also come to light. If you pre-order from retailers that are participating, you get the Elite Solider Pack that gives you an extra soldier modeled after the original XCOM game. In addition, you will also get the Solider Deco packs for aesthetic armor that also include a number of colors and other things to decorate your armor.

In a unique twist for PC users, there will be a Special Edition version of the PC version that includes an art book, folder out poster of the XCOM headquarters, XCOM insignia patch, and a number of exclusive digital content items, including the soundtrack, desktop wallpaper, and a number of other things to be determined at a later date. Sounds like a nice package for those playing on the PC, for once.

Duke Nukem Forever has finally been released, and 2K Games and developer Gearbox have to be happy that the game has finally dropped so that the longest running joke in the video games industry will end. All isn’t a celebration, however; the reviews of the game are pretty bad, with the game achieving a Metacritic score of just 49 as of the writing of this story. A rating of 49, as you can guess, is pretty darn bad.

After reading a number of the reviews, we can tell you that the majority of the reviews are pretty unkind, suggesting that the game was just cobbled together; which is surprising, given the length that the game was in development and the large amount of time there was to develop a story line and create assets that could be used in the final title produced.

In the end, we suspect that DNF will sell pretty well, but it will never make back the amount of money invested in the development of the game. The game teases another sequel, which we do suspect will be much better than this mess of a game. While there appeared to be some momentum, in the end it just didn’t live up to the hype. But how could it after 12 years of waiting?

Still, we wanted and hoped for more, but honestly, getting the game out was the first thing that needed to happen and that it did. We expect next time around the next offering in the franchise will be much better and deliver a better experience, or so we can hope.

In a strange reversal of its previous stance, 2K Games has announced that they are going to finish the final patch for the PC version of BioShock 2 and release it. The decision is actually very surprising, as the company previously announced that they would not be releasing the final patch to correct a number of issues on the PC platform. The final patch has already been released for both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 console platforms.

The company didn’t get into much detail as to why they decided to change their previous decision, but the company claims that the outcry from PC fans following the announcement was enough to change their mind. The company claimed that they “…have always tried to keep an open dialog with gamers and listen to what they have to say,” and this is the reason that they have elected to not only finish the final patch for the game on the PC, but to also release both download content packs on the PC.

Both the Minerva’s Den and Protector Trials downloadable content packs will be released and sold for the PC version of BioShock 2 after all. The patch, as well as the two downloadable content packs, will still have to go through the Microsoft certification process, and the PC version of BioShock 2 is a Games for Windows title. 2K expects that they will obtain certification from Microsoft in the coming weeks and it will then be made available. It just goes to show that not all feedback to a developer falls on deaf ears.